Cellular wireless communications systems are designed to serve many access terminals distributed in a large geographic area by dividing the area into cells. At or near the center of each cell, a base transceiver station is located to serve access terminals (e.g., cellular telephones, laptops, PDAs) located in the cell. Each cell is often further divided into sectors by using multiple sectorized antennas. In each cell, a radio node at the base transceiver station serves one or more sectors and communicates with multiple access terminals in its cell. A radio node can generally support a certain amount of traffic in each sector for a particular bandwidth and it is often desirable to monitor the level of traffic in a sector in order to ensure that the sector is not becoming overloaded. Furthermore, it is often desirable to reduce delays in the flow of the traffic between the access terminals and the radio node, especially when the traffic includes delay-sensitive data, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) data.